So how exactly did Skrillex (Sonny Moore) go from kicking off his electronic music career in 2010 to taking over (and selling out) Bay Area music venues in 2014, mostly on the strength of about a half dozen EPs?

"It's almost a kind of repudiation of the album format," says Kimberly Chun, who interviewed Moore for this week's cover story. "He's an intriguing hybrid of a genuinely virally bred and live-performance artist/producer who's come up outside of a traditional music industry system, who, when it came to his first EP, 'dropped it Beyoncé,' in his words."

"People just started to catch up," he says, "and I still don't know how."

And those fans, Moore says, have had a big impact on him as well. "There's power in numbers," he says. "You have to get a great group of people who have great taste and stick to their guns and are not afraid to be a f- boss and be vulnerable and be naked and show yourself for who you are. If you have a ton of people in a group, you can do anything. It's all about the artists feeling empowered."